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Kinky Friedman: What do you have to lose?

I really want to interview Kinky Friedman on The Armadillo Podcast. Kinky is running for Texas governor in '06 and his campaign slogan is "Why the hell not?" But since I've sent two emails to his PR person with no reply, I'm re-branding the Kinkster with this slogan instead: "Kinky Friedman: What do you have to lose?"

I told her about his most famous songs--"They Don't Make Jews Like Jesus Anymore," and "Get Your Biscuits in the Oven and Your Buns in the Bed." I told about how after his band, The Texas Jewboys, broke up, Kinky turned to writing mystery novels, and that he currently boasts over twenty titles about a quotable, singer-songwriter, Jewish Texan, who lives in New York and solves crimes between witticisms.

Then I told her that Kinky has a book entitled Armadillos and Lace, and that in all his books his protagonist has the same name as his.

There was a long silence on the phone...

"This man is considered a serious candidate in Texas?"

Well, no. But I think he's serious about at least running for office, quips aside.

But Kinky has a huge obstacle, or rather a quixotic quest ahead of him. The Kinkster will need 50,000 registered voters to sign a petition before he can be allowed on the ballot as an independent. Texas law requires that he obtain 50,000 signatures but ONLY between March
8 and May 11 and ONLY from people who do not cast a ballot in any party primary
or runoff.

I'd like to do my part. If nothing else, I want Kinky on the ballot just to give us another choice. Because, to paraphrase Kinky, each election year Texans are only given two choices: between paper and plastic.

I read in a great New Yorker article about the candidate that he's recently hired an adman who helped Jesse Ventura to his unlikely win 1998. Like Ventura's campaign before it, the Committe to Elect the Kinkster is looking into strategies that will attract, "unlikely voters," according to theNew Yorker.

In your quest to enlist the unlikely, I really hope ya'll will embrace both the bloggers and the podcasters. (His site has a section entitled "Blog" but it appears to be primarily staff-written. Tsk, tsk.)

Kinky, I really hope you will come be a guest on my podcast. And as I said at the top of this post, Kinky Friedman, what do you have to lose?

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Weekly podcast interviews of Austinites famous and infamous, known and unknown, with the sole intent to convince my good friend Galia, an Israeli woman living way out in California, to move and live with us here in Austin, Texas, the land of the weird and the home of the armadillo.